Menu

Day: April 7, 2017

The first thing on this is a few bits of video editing I did, as a bit of an experiment to see what was possible. All I had was a couple of VHS decks, nothing sophisticated.

I’d record the intended soundtrack from a CD onto the tape, then I’d use a feature one of my decks had, probably called video dubbing or something similar. This allowed me to record over the video track on the tape, but leave the original lo-fi linear audio track intact.

Thus, by using a lot of trial and error, I was able to work out my timings so that I could cue up the source tape, pause the dubbed tape, and press record on one and play on the other at just the right time to dub the exact part of the source I wanted.

It was very fiddly, and a short two minute sequence, with not that many cuts, took me a whole evening to do.

The footage was recorded by me on a short holiday in Whitby with four schoolfriends (although we’d all left school by then). One afternoon, since I had my video camera, we thought it would be fun to make a music video, so I filmed them doing various stupid things, intending to edit them together later.

I think it was a long time later before I got around to doing that, but the results aren’t totally rubbish. I’m particularly happy with the way the high-five at the end syncs up so perfectly with the music. That was a total fluke, I have to admit.

Enjoy my youthful foray into the wonderful world of editing.

One technical note – this isn’t strictly the original, as, when I digitised it, it automatically took the Hi-Fi soundtrack from the tape, which was the original sound from the video I shot, rather than the overdubbed soundtrack music. This is a ‘restoration’ I had to do in Premiere, taking the original CD track and overlaying the video footage.

I don’t just throw this thing together, you know.

As well as two versions of this masterwork (this was the second, slightly better cut), I also cut together some spaceship shots from Star Trek III to music from Danny Elfman’s Batman soundtrack, but I haven’t tried to sync those up as well.

If that had been all that was on the tape, I probably would have skipped it, but after this playing around, there’s an episode of Equinox called Unravelling the Universe. It’s a look at Quantum Theory. I like Rocky Kolb’s jumper. And that there’s a physics professor called Rocky.

It’s narrated by the great Peter Jones. I wonder how many jobs he got like this – all thanks to Douglas Adams and Geoffrey Perkins casting him as the voice of the book in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The programme does a reenactment (or I suppose that should be ‘enactment’) of Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment.

It’s an interesting programme, but as usual only really skirts the subject.

After this, recording continues for 15 minutes with a bit of The Long Ride – a sort of Long Way Round but without someone famous like Ewan McGregor.